Drop, charge, and lose the cords
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- Average user rating: stars out of 49 votes Back to product review
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4 stars
Version: CrazyTalk Pro 5.1
"Fun and easy to use animator"
Pros: Crazy Talk 5 PRO is a pretty solid piece of software engineering that literally takes still facial photos and converts the eyes, mouth, and other facial features into fluid motion. You can be a real puppeteer and use your creations in videos.
Cons: The movement of the head is limiited. You cannot turn it sideways, and it takes considerable time and a sophisticated video editor to put two talking interacting characters into one frame. (The new 6.0 version claims to do this integratively.)
Summary: A well engineered software product with good responsive online help. Crazy Talk 5 PRO is enjoyable to use for the most part, and had few bugs in it. However, not just any facial photo of a human, animal, etc., will work well, since the lips need to be closed fully to add teeth, and if the angle of the head isn't full frontal, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to get eyes and mouth features to work well. It does force its user to be very selective in choosing the "right" photo. Despite these limitations, it still provides a wide latitude of creativeness that should make it fun and worthwhile to a user who doesn't want long learning curves and complex animation programs to tackle. You'll probably be happy with paying the rather steep price, and I suspect it's a bit high because there's really nothing else quite like it on the market. I've used it frequently on You Tube to animate portions of my videos, and have actually done entire animated short stories. Inanimate objects like a toilet, pumpkin, or some ready-made cartoon character can be easily made to talk, with some hilarious effect.
All in all, it's much fun, fairly easy to master, but I wish they'd lower the price on the PRO edition. If you ever wanted to be a puppeteer, or are or were one, you'll especially enjoy its features. Sound (only .wav files allowed) integrates automatically very well, or you can manually manipulate the mouth, or use both features combined. There is a good assortment of ready-made facial expression, eyes, teeth, mouth colors, motions, etc. Static backgrounds from photos can be easily created and animated characters can move left to right and vice versa, up and down, or even spin. Zoom feature allows dramatic or comic emphasis. A really nice piece of reliable creative software that integrated well into Vista and doesn't suck a lot of RAM.
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